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"Let books be your dining table, / And you shall be full of delights. / Let them be yourmattress,/And you shall sleep restful nights" (St. Ephraim the Syrian).

Thursday, April 16, 2015

A Centenary of Armenian Tears (Updated)

I recently discussed the Armenian Genocide in my class on Eastern Christian encounters with Islam. And lo and behold the very next week Pope Francis acknowledged what every other sane and serious person on the planet knows, viz., that it was an organized, systematic slaughter of the Armenians both qua Armenians and also as Christians: thus a genocide. The Turkish government, of course, did not cover themselves in glory in their response to the pope, a response as risible as that given by the Turkish MP interviewed in this documentary (at 16:31), which I showed to my students:

As I have noted on here several times over the last two years, 2014 marked the centenary of the outbreak of the Great War, and now in April 2015 we are marking the centenary of the Armenian Genocide. (The New Yorker has a long and fascinating article on the genocide, which you may read here.)

A century after the devastating mass killing of the Ottoman Armenians
during the Armenian Genocide—considered one of the first genocides of
the 20th century—this catastrophe continues to raise important and
troubling issues, particularly given the Turkish state's ongoing denial.
Indeed, much of the continuing instability and conflict in the Caucasus
is rooted in the Armenian Genocide. Drawing upon diverse academic
disciplines and written by a single author who is a leading expert on
the subject, The Armenian Genocide: A Century of Remembrance and Denial
explores the profound short- and long-term impacts of the 1915 Armenian
Genocide. The chapters document how this genocide created a scattered
and traumatized Armenian Diaspora and imposed major stresses upon the
tiny and vulnerable landlocked Armenian state. The book addresses
difficult topics such as the challenge of the "double death" of the
victims as a result of the ongoing Turkish state denial. This volume
provides an analysis of the Armenian Genocide from several analytical
perspectives, thereby giving readers a more comprehensive understanding
of this enormously important subject.

About the Armenian genocide--accompanied by an equally devastating, though far less well known, simultaneous slaughter of Pontic Greeks and Assyrian Christians, and later Aegean Greek Christians also--we have seen a number of recent books, and later in 2015 will see several more. (For those desirous of some background at the conceptual and biographical level of "genocide" and the terms origins in the work of Raphael Lemkin, see here.)

The most controversial question that is still being asked about the
First World War - was there an Armenian genocide? - will come to a head
on 24 April 2015, when Armenians worldwide will commemorate its
centenary and Turkey will deny that it took place, claiming that the
deaths of over half of the Armenian race were justified. This has
become a vital international issue. Twenty national parliaments in
democratic countries have voted to recognise the genocide, but Britain
and the USA continue to equivocate for fear of alienating their NATO
ally. Geoffrey Robertson QC condemns this hypocrisy, and in An
Inconvenient Genocide he proves beyond reasonable doubt that the
horrific events in the Ottoman Empire in 1915 constitute the crime
against humanity that is today known as genocide. He explains how
democracies can deal with genocide denial without infringing free
speech, and makes a major contribution to understanding and preventing
this worst of all crimes. His renowned powers of advocacy are on full
display as he condemns all those - from Sri Lanka to the Sudan, from Old
Anatolia to modern Syria and Iraq - who try to justify the mass murder
of children and civilians in the name of military necessity or religious
fervour.

While much of the international community regards the forced deportation
of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in 1915, where approximately
800,000 to 1.5 million Armenians perished, as genocide, the Turkish
state still officially denies it.

In Denial of Violence,
Fatma Müge Göçek seeks to decipher the roots of this disavowal. To
capture the negotiation of meaning that leads to denial, Göçek undertook
a qualitative analysis of 315 memoirs published in Turkey from 1789 to
2009 in addition to numerous secondary sources, journals, and
newspapers. She argues that denial is a multi-layered, historical
process with four distinct yet overlapping components: the structural
elements of collective violence and situated modernity on one side, and
the emotional elements of collective emotions and legitimating events on
the other. In the Turkish case, denial emerged through four stages: (i)
the initial imperial denial of the origins of the collective violence
committed against the Armenians commenced in 1789 and continued until
1907; (ii) the Young Turk denial of the act of violence lasted for a
decade from 1908 to 1918; (iii) early republican denial of the actors of
violence took place from 1919 to 1973; and (iv) the late republican
denial of the responsibility for the collective violence started in 1974
and continues today.

Denial of Violence develops a
novel theoretical, historical and methodological framework to
understanding what happened and why the denial of collective violence
against Armenians still persists within Turkish state and society.

The destruction of the Armenians of the Ottoman Empire in 1915-16 was
the greatest atrocity of World War I. Around one million Armenians were
killed, and the survivors were scattered across the world. Although it
is now a century old, the issue of what most of the world calls the
Armenian Genocide of 1915 is still a live and divisive issue that
mobilizes Armenians across the world, shapes the identity and politics
of modern Turkey, and has consumed the attention of U.S. politicians for
years.

In Great Catastrophe, the eminent scholar and
reporter Thomas de Waal looks at the aftermath and politics of the
Armenian Genocide and tells the story of recent efforts by courageous
Armenians, Kurds, and Turks to come to terms with the disaster as Turkey
enters a new post-Kemalist era. The story of what happened to the
Armenians in 1915-16 is well-known. Here we are told the "history of the
history" and the lesser-known story of what happened to Armenians,
Kurds, and Turks in the century that followed. De Waal relates how
different generations tackled the issue of the "Great Catastrophe" from
the 1920s until the failure of the Protocols signed by independent
Armenia and Turkey in 2010. Quarrels between diaspora Armenians
supporting and opposing the Soviet Union broke into violence and
culminated with the murder of an archbishop in 1933. The devising of the
word "genocide," the growth of modern identity politics, and the 50th
anniversary of the massacres re-energized a new generation of Armenians.
In Turkey the issue was initially forgotten, only to return to the
political agenda in the context of the Cold War and an outbreak of
Armenian terrorism. More recently, Turkey has started to confront its
taboos. In an astonishing revival of oral history, the descendants of
tens of thousands of "Islamized Armenians," who have been in the shadows
since 1915, have begun to reemerge and reclaim their identities.

Drawing
on archival sources, reportage and moving personal stories, de Waal
tells the full story of Armenian-Turkish relations since the Genocide in
all its extraordinary twists and turns. He looks behind the propaganda
to examine the realities of a terrible historical crime and the divisive
"politics of genocide" it produced. The book throws light not only on
our understanding of Armenian-Turkish relations but also of how mass
atrocities and historical tragedies shape contemporary politics.

Sacred Justice is a cross-genre book
that uses narrative, memoir, unpublished letters, and other primary and
secondary sources to tell the story of a group of Armenian men who
organized Operation Nemesis, a covert operation created to assassinate
the Turkish architects of the Armenian Genocide. The leaders of
Operation Nemesis took it upon themselves to seek justice for their
murdered families, friends, and compatriots.
This book includes a
large collection of previously unpublished letters that show the
strategies, personalities, plans, and dedication of Soghomon Tehlirian,
who killed Talaat Pasha, a genocide leader; Shahan Natalie, the agent on
the ground in Europe; Armen Garo, the center of Operation Nemesis;
Aaron Sachaklian, the logistics and finance officer; and others involved
with Nemesis.

The author tells a story that has been either
hidden by the necessity of silence or ignored in spite of victims’
narratives. This is the story of those who attempted to seek justice for
the victims and the effect this effort had on them and on their
families. The book shows how the narratives of resistance and trauma can
play out in the next generation and how resistance can promote
resilience. Little has been written about Operation Nemesis. As we
approach the centennial anniversary of the Armenian Genocide, it is
time.

The Armenian Genocide has often been
considered a template for subsequent genocides and is one of the first
genocides of the 20th century. As such, it holds crucial historical
significance, and it is critically important that today's students
understand this case study of inhumanity. This book provides a
much-needed, long-overdue reference volume on the Armenian Genocide. It
begins with seven introductory analytical essays that provide a broad
overview of the Armenian Genocide and then presents individual entries, a
historical timeline, and a selection of documents.
This
essential reference work covers all aspects of the Armenian Genocide,
including the causes, phases, and consequences. It explores political
and historical perspectives as well as the cultural aspects. The
carefully selected collection of perspective essays will inspire
critical thinking and provide readers with insight into some of the most
controversial and significant issues of the Armenian Genocide.
Similarly, the primary source documents are prefaced by thoughtful
introductions that will provide the necessary context to help students
understand the significance of the material.

Armenian Aram Haigaz was only 15 when he lost his father, brothers, many
relatives and neighbors, all killed or dead of starvation when enemy
soldiers surrounded their village. He and his mother were put into a
forced march and deportation of Armenians into the Turkish desert, part
of the systematic destruction of the largely Christian Armenian
population in 1915 by the Ottoman Empire. His mother urged Aram to
convert to Islam in order to survive, and on the fourth day of the
march, a Turk agreed to take this young convert into his household. Aram
spent four long years living as a slave, servant and shepherd among
Kurdish tribes, slowly gaining his captors’ trust. He grew from a boy to
a man in these years and his narrative offers readers a remarkable
coming of age story as well as a valuable eyewitness to history. Haigaz
was able to escape to the United States in 1921.

There are, I know, further books in the works so stay tuned on here for details of some of them.

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About Me

I am the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies; author of Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy; a tenured associate professor and chairman of the Dept. of Theology and Philosophy at the University of Saint Francis in Fort Wayne, Indiana; and a subdeacon of the Ukrainian Greco-Catholic Church (UGCC) resident in the Eparchy of St. Nicholas of Chicago.